Review of The Art of Travel

I have always been inspired by Albert Einstein’s famous quotation: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” For Einstein, clarity in communication isn't about dumbing down ideas but demonstrating one’s mastery by distilling complexity into accessible language, showing deep comprehension rather than confusion or reliance on jargon.  I have always believed, as a teacher of some forty years' standing, that communication was at least as important as the content I was trying to convey.  I remember well one mathematics professor I had at college, who always left me perplexed after every lecture, and who consequently led me to believe I could never get my head around his specific area.  However, I had another extremely clever lecturer, whose area was equally as complex, explaining his particular speciality in mathematical language that I could get my head around.  I remember discussing this mystery in communication with a friend who was older and wiser. He informed me that, like some other students, he had realised early on that the first professor was what he termed a “mystifier” who liked to confound and confuse learners by way of seeking to impress them with his comprehension of abstruse matters and that equally obviously his students were particular dullards.  Some years later, when I was a more mature student, I came across many brilliant communicators, the foremost of whom was a Jesuit priest who lectured me in English literature, a couple of books by whom I will review later in these posts.

I wish to review here a short but brilliant book by Alain de Botton (1969 -) entitled The Art of Travel (Penguin Books, 2003).  De Botton is a master communicator in Einstein’s understanding of that term; the reader feels that he or she is sitting at the feet of a master exponent.  He is a polyglot who speaks English, French and German as he was brought up and educated through all three during the course of his privileged life. He is also noted as co-founder of The School of Life in 2008 and Living Architecture in 2009, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011.  He is equally at home in philosophy as he is in European literature, and his books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, always emphasising philosophy's relevance to everyday life.  His is a practical philosophy insofar as it helps us get through life in a reflective, mature and as balanced a way as possible.  His website states the philosophy of his organisation, and in like manner, that of his books, thus: “Everything we create at The School of Life is designed to meet emotional needs – not just fill a shelf. From books that build love and confidence to cards and games that deepen connection, our tools support self-understanding. For those drawn to less material gifts, our App offers insight that lasts beyond the season. And our Membership welcomes you into a global community devoted to emotional growth – all year round.” To a large extent, this would place De Botton very much in the self-help school of thought and feeling, and spiritually, to no small measure, within the perennial philosophy approach to living.

This book is a wonderful physical production, indeed a veritable artefact, with a well-written text supplemented by well-chosen photographs by the author. There are also wonderful reproductions of works of art by various artists over the years that illustrate the innate drive in humans to travel beyond their own frontiers.  The layout of the chapters is also very well thought out and clearly presented.

The first chapter recounts the author’s trip to Barbados, the eastern Caribbean island and an independent British Commonwealth nation.  He presents us with the psychology of the would-be traveller, caught on the horns of a dilemma between yearning to leave home, to strike out for new surroundings and desiring to stay in the security and safety of home.  In this, he captures something of the existential dilemma of making choices which we often experience before setting out.  He does undertake his trip, which he enjoys and recounts with delight, while introducing us to an author I hadn’t heard of before by the name of J.K. Huysmans (1848 – 1907). De Botton gives us a brief summary of Huysmans’ rather witty novel À rebours (1884) that recounts the story of a reluctant traveller who turns back before setting out on a trip. That novel was translated as Against the Grain.  The literal meaning of the title in French is “going backwards.”

The second chapter introduces us to various means of transport and places of departure and arrival, like train stations and airports. He balances these with introducing us, on the one hand, to Charles Baudelaire [1821 -1867], poet, essayist, art critic and translator, and, on the other, to the American artist Edward Hopper.  The first of these, Baudelaire, was always uncomfortable and uneasy at home and had an abiding desire to break away from that dreadful experience.  As a boy, he had dreamt of leaving France and travelling as far away as possible.  Having set out for India, he stopped off at Mauritius for some time without proceeding any further.  The second of de Botton’s chosen characters is Edward Hopper, whom I had heard of but was unacquainted with his wonderful work. The author includes wonderful reproductions of some of Hopper’s work that illustrate travelling and the traveller.  Again, we are informed that in 1906, Hopper went to Paris, where he discovered the poetry of Baudelaire, whose work he was to read and recite throughout his life.  Baudelaire is famous for his connection with the modernity movement in the arts.  While he did not invent the concept, he is widely credited with coining the term "modernity" (“modernité”) in the context of art and aesthetics.   What connected both these characters, de Botton suggests, was their shared interest in city life, modernity and especially the loneliness associated with both these items.  Four works by Hopper are reproduced, my favourite being the stunning “Automat,” painted in 1927.  It is a picture of loneliness where a lone young woman sits at a table in some late-night café or even a bare railway waiting room drinking a cup of coffee.  When we travel, we often encounter such scenes.  This painting could certainly be used to illustrate a lecture on existential psychotherapy, with the word “emptiness” emphasised on the title slide, a term that the American therapist, Rollo May, used to describe alienation and loneliness felt by modern human beings.

All the other chapters follow the same methodology: a modern journey taken, coupled with a writer or artist of note.  Chapter three recounts a visit to Amsterdam and an account of the travels of another great French literatus of the nineteenth century, namely Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880). For the latter, travel was an excellent way to escape the monotony of life and the boredom that surrounded him in his native Rouen.  We learn that Flaubert broke all the rules of convention and was openly atheistic, hedonistic and quite simply amoral for the century in which he lived, and immediately loved the chaos of Alexandria in Egypt, where he spent some nine months. Gustave Flaubert was a leading figure in the movement known as literary Realism.  He was renowned for his meticulous, objective style and would constantly rewrite until he found what he termed “le mot juste,” the right word.  Realism meant that he despised authors and indeed bourgeois society for sugarcoating real life to cover up the less palatable habits the human race is heir to.  His first novel, Madame Bovary, was consequently banned, and much of his later work was often criticised for its lack of decorum.

The rest of the chapters, bar one, which I won’t describe in any detail whatsoever, I will leave to the enthusiastic reader to feast on themselves.  Those chapters are equally illuminating on travel.  They present the reader with other interesting and extraordinary parallels between travelling and literature and art: Madrid and the navigator Humboldt; the Lake District and Wordsworth; Sinai Desert and Edmund Burke, with Job thrown in for good measure; London and Xavier de Maistre (1763 – 1852), an author who wrote a famous parody of the grand narratives of travel espoused by aristocracy and indeed the new bourgeoisie; finishing with a chapter on touring many locations of importance with John Ruskin as our guide.

The chapter that I said I would finish this review with is Chapter 7 entitled “Eye-Opening Art,” and it deals in a most thought-provoking way with touring Provence and pondering the extraordinary and brilliant art of Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890).  To my mind, it is the finest of chapters in a very fine book indeed. Van Gogh needs no introduction; his work is so well known.  He is interesting from the psychological or mental health point of view, the significance of his life and, of course, from an artistic perspective.  His interactions with the landscape of Provence and how it influenced his work is surely worth reading about and pondering deeply.  Landscape, after all, forms and shapes us no matter where we are from or where we travel.  Van Gogh travelled from Paris to Arles in Provence in 1888, and he remained there for fifteen months. Most amazingly, during that time, he painted 200 works of art, made 100 drawings and wrote around 200 letters.  That period he spent in Arles, most commentators and art historians agree, is his greatest.

Van Gogh believed that most of the classical artists had failed to see what was in front of them.  They had not produced realistic depictions of Provence in the sense that they were not interacting in a personal way with the landscape.  Here, as a would-be philosopher, I can ask the question, “What is reality?”  However, I know all too well that this question is particularly difficult to answer. The best response I have heard over the years is “We do not see the world as it is, but as we are.”  This quotation has been variously attributed to Immanuel Kant and Anais Nin, among many others.  In other words, we each of us look out on the world before us with our own glasses, our own personal prejudices and perspectives, indeed with our own individual mental structures.  What I might see is not quite what you see, or what someone else sees.  Of course, we can agree on shared similarities, but we will each have a different angle on the object viewed or considered.  This is essentially what van Gogh meant when he said that the artists before him had failed to see what was before them.  They were trying too hard to be objective in straining after reality.  De Botton puts it succinctly: “Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.” (p. 193).  No one had ever painted cypresses or olive trees with such majestic energy before van Gogh.  He saw primary colours (red, yellow, blue) as the foundation of all colour, believing they could create any shade, including vibrant blacks and complex greys, and used them with complementary pairs (blue/orange, red/green, yellow/purple) to create intense visual contrast and emotional depth in his art, making colours "speak" rather than just mimic reality.

In short, this Dutch artist was one who saw reality in a diaphanous way, by which I mean that he could see deeper into reality than the realists he criticised.  Again, De Botton describes this attitude succinctly: “The part of reality that concerned him sometimes required distortion, omission and substitution of colours to be brought to the fore, but it was still real.” (p. 208) The artist was willing to sacrifice a naïve or superficial realism to achieve a realism of depth.  Now, there is an interesting link here, to my mind, with Dostoevsky, who saw his own realism as extraordinary, or extra deep, a realism he called a “fantastic realism.” Hence, an artist or writer can teach us how to see a new landscape.  We who ponder the works of van Gogh can travel to the region of Provence and see the landscape with a deeper and different perspective. 

Travel broadens the mind, but being open to seeing deeper into things is also necessary if we are to be travellers true to the landscape we encounter; true also to ourselves and others.  There are as many perspectives on reality as there are people.  What a shame and what a tragedy that warring nations and power-hungry narcissistic leaders just don’t see what’s in front of their noses.  All this and more can be learnt from this gem of a book.